Most traffic collisions could be avoided if definitive action is taken quickly enough, while harm from those collisions that are truly unavoidable could be minimized by actively managing the interaction in real-time. However, at freeway speeds, human reflexes are not fast enough and human judgment not sufficient. Instead, electronic reflexes and speed-of-light signal propagation are needed to enable a wide range of collision mitigation options. A suitable collision-avoidance or harm-minimization action must be planned and controlled. Typically thousands or millions of possible actions must be analyzed and compared, depending on the parameters of each particular collision scenario. A supercomputer would be needed to rapidly evaluate the imminent collision, review prior mitigation attempts, create new plans tailored to the current emergency, select the best option, and begin implementing it, all of which must be performed before the vehicles actually collide. Since vehicles generally do not have supercomputers on-board, it is not possible to find the best avoidance strategy in a brief time-to-collision, leading to many unnecessary collisions and thousands of fatalities.
What is needed is means for a vehicle, facing an imminent collision, to obtain the most effective collision-mitigation strategy, quickly enough for it to be implemented.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.